Jul 19, 2014

Add the new Google Maps to your Website with Street View

I have written a new web app that should make it extremely easy for you to embed the new version of Google Maps in your website or blog. Available at ctrlq.org, the apps lets you add basic road maps, satellite imagery or even maps with Street View Panoramas to your website (see video demo).

Getting started is easy. Search for a place and pan or zoom to make sure that the Google Maps area you’d like to embed is visible inside the browser window. The embed code, available in the lower left corner, updates automatically as you move around the map.

You may be wondering why would anyone need another code generator when the map embedding options are available on the Google Maps website itself. Well, there are two reasons.

One, Google Maps does not offer an option to embed Street View panoramas. You could do that in the old (classic) version of Google Maps but that feature is no longer available. With the ctrlq generator, you can add interactive street views panoramas just like regular Google Maps in one easy step.

The other reason is that the new embeddable Google Maps are personalized and thus look very cluttered to users who are signed-in to Google. If all you want to do is add a minimalistic Google Map in your web pages without any personalization features, you’ll find my app handy.

Internally, the app uses the Google Maps API to generate the embed code and wraps everything inside the IFRAME tag. With a little CSS, you can even make your embedded Google Maps responsive.